On the web: Take advantage of email marketing

As a business owner or marketing professional you have a multitude of avenues for engaging or attracting customers. Merely 15 years ago this wasn’t the case. At that time you were limited to traditional advertising methods – print and TV ads, direct mail, radio spots and billboards.

But today you can harness digital means, like social media, blogging, web-based campaigns, or even video spots on your YouTube channel.

But I want to focus on a method that’s unfortunately not used nearly often enough: email marketing.

Unless you are a complete Luddite you have some experience with email marketing, because if you’re like me you’re sent numerous promotions throughout the day from places you’ve purchased from or even viewed online. Think about these emails you get. Undoubtedly you delete many without opening, but every now and then one catches your eye, doesn’t it? The same is true for your customers: though they probably delete most of the email promotions they receive, they do occasionally open them too.

You might ask, “so what?” If you know that most people may delete the emails, why bother running an email campaign?

Well the answer is in the proven return on investment (ROI) of email marketing.

There are a slew of studies demonstrating that email marketing has one of the highest ROI’s of any other marketing medium. An experiment published in the Harvard Business Review for example suggested that in an analysis between direct mailing and email marketing, the ROI of email marketing was 2,600 percent while for direct mailing it was only 27 percent.

The experiment’s caveat was that it just analyzed the cost of the actually sending each message (which worked out to 60 cents for mailers and 006 cents for emails). This doesn’t take into account any of the work involved in gathering emails, designing templates, etc. (which I discuss in a bit), however the same must be undertaken for direct mailing as well.

Other studies report the results of surveys of businesses that use email marketing. In every study, businesses rank ROI of email marketing as consistently being the highest when compared to the other methods of marketing they use.

So if it’s so valuable, why don’t more small businesses use it?

The problem with email marketing is that it can seem a bit intimidating. First you have to gather email addresses. Next you need to design an email and use special software to send the emails out. Finally, you have to have something to say.

Here I’ll address each and provide some tips to make it a bit easier for you to get started.

Gathering email addresses does take time (unless you simply purchase an email list, which could be expensive and at the same time completely worthless), but it is time well spent. You can ask visitors to your website to sign up, you can ask them through your various social media outlets, you can even include a request for their email address on any paperwork they have to fill out and then add those to your mass email list. With time, though, the list that you send to will grow and you will have a dedicated pool of people to contact on a frequent basis.

However, you probably will need special software to design and send the emails. You cannot create html-driven graphic emails in most email programs, like Gmail. And while Outlook allows you to structure information, it will only keep that structure in other Outlook clients, not on other email systems. Further, if you have a large list your email provider will most likely not allow you to send the emails, and if they did send they probably would not all be delivered.

There are a number of companies that provide both templates and mass email ability. Some might be well known, like Constant Contact and MailChimp, but these aren’t the only two (Google mass email campaigns to see more). Price models will vary, with some charging by the number of emails sent, some offering subscriptions etc. What’s nice is that all of these take care of the legal aspects: the spam laws that could get you in trouble. Also, each of these tracks the email campaigns, allowing you to see things like how many people opened the emails, what links they clicked on, etc.

As to what you should say? Well I would advise not to simply send advertisements. Remember these people gave you their email address so they want to hear from you, do you really think they want to read an ad? Instead, send them tips or tricks of the your trade, discounts or news about events or sales. Send them information they might actually want to read. If you can, try to create a monthly newsletter to always stay in their inbox.

In the end it really isn’t a big investment to get started with an email marketing campaign, and with (potentially) a 2600 percent ROI, what have you got to lose?

Clint Lanier is an associate professor at New Mexico State University.